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You too can be a Management Consultant

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After a lot of thought, I've decided that I can teach you this management consulting gig in one easy lesson.

Consultants are basically paid smart friends. You know something of value and you put your friend's interests ahead of yours. Usually people bring in a consultant when there is something they do not know, or some disagreement that must be settled. Consulting involves traveling -- sometimes overseas -- to meet these people and work with them.

Of course, people already have ideas and opinions and ways of doing things. For you to be effective, that has to change.

Put briefly, management consulting is traveling to far away places and finding people to disagree with. Then you make them do things they would not naturally do.

Can you be a management consultant? Well, how do you answer the following questions?


  • Do you have some knowledge that people might be willing to pay for?

  • Are you good at traveling?

  • Have people called you disagreeable?

  • Are you able to fake being somebody's friend?

  • Do you have a list of pointless stories that seem to have some deeper message?

  • How about a slogan, or some easy witticism like "There is no 'I' in team"?

If you answered any of these questions yes or no, you probably can't be a management consultant. The first rule of consulting is that all answers begin with "it depends" followed by some kind of technical goobledegook that only Stephen Hawking could understand.

If you skipped the entire list of questions, you could be a consultant. A consultant is a paid friend, and since you're not getting paid, no point in answering any questions from me, right?

So go out today and find some strangers and disagree with them. The more emotional they are, the better. After all, people are never rational (although they always feel that they are). Find a priest and engage in a lively discussion about the existence of God, or find some angry demonstrators and tell them their cause is silly (in a nice way). Tell your wife that yes, those clothes do make her look fat.

You may disagree with me. You may say, hey, Daniel, consulting is about a lot more than traveling to far away places to disagree with strangers and make them do things. Consulting is about building relationships, sharpening your knowledge, resolving conflict, seeing missed opportunities. I've read your article and tried these exercises and you're way off base here.

Let's review. I used the internet to visit a far away place (your computer), disagree with you, and then make you do all this pointless stuff like answer questions and tick off your local priest. I don't know about you, but from where I'm sitting, my career is on the fast track.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on December 5, 2008 3:18 PM.

Inifinite Aggregation Aggravation was the previous entry in this blog.

TDD: I Want to Believe is the next entry in this blog.

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